wired.com Archives - 21 April 2013, Sunday

Let’s say you believe that the price of gold is going to go through the roof (as opposed to where it has been going lately: the basement). To capitalize on that belief, do you run out and invest in mining or smelting equipment companies? Or do you just buy gold? (You buy gold.) But th...

Let’s say you believe that the price of gold is going to go through the roof (as opposed to where it has been going lately: the basement). To capitalize on that belief, do you run out and invest in mining or smelting equipment companies? Or do you just buy gold? (You buy gold.) But th...

Maybe it’s a sign of the Bitcoin bubble. Criminals are trying to take control of PCs and turn them into Bitcoin miners. According to antivirus seller Kaspersky Lab , there’s a new Trojan — spotted just yesterday and spreading via Skype — that takes control of infected machines and for...

A Bitcoin transaction services company says that hackers broke into one of its brokerage accounts last week, nabbing more than $12,000 worth of the digital currency. That attack knocked Bitinstant offline over the weekend. The company says that while it lost Bitcoins, no customers wer...

A Bitcoin transaction services company says that hackers broke into one of its brokerage accounts last week, nabbing more than $12,000 worth of the digital currency. That attack knocked Bitinstant offline over the weekend. The company says that while it lost Bitcoins, no customers wer...

A Bitcoin transaction services company says that hackers broke into one of its brokerage accounts last week, nabbing more than $12,000 worth of the digital currency. That attack knocked Bitinstant offline over the weekend. The company says that while it lost Bitcoins, no customers wer...

A Bitcoin transaction services company says that hackers broke into one of its brokerage accounts last week, nabbing more than $12,000 worth of the digital currency. That attack knocked Bitinstant offline over the weekend. The company says that while it lost Bitcoins, no customers wer...

A 3-D model of a bitcoin - not an actual bitcoin, which is purely digital. Photo: Trader Tim /Flickr The FBI sees the anonymous Bitcoin payment network as an alarming haven for money laundering and other criminal activity — including as a tool for hackers to rip off fellow Bitcoin use...

Year of the Gadget Startup at CES? 10:16 AM PST posted by Alexandra Chang I just attended a breakfast with Indiegogo and a few companies with campaigns on the crowdfunding site. Indiegogo CEO and co-founder Slava Rubin suggested that CES 2013 is the year of the little guy, of the gadg...

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Each week, Wired Design brings you a photo of one of our favorite buildings, showcasing boundary-pushing architecture and design involved in the unique structures that make the world's cityscapes interesting. Check back Fridays for the continuing series, and feel free to make recommen...

Bob Stuart is being charged with promoting illegal gambling over a commercial software program he licenses to online casinos and bookmakers. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired In a criminal case sure to make programmers nervous, a software maker who licenses a program used by online casinos...

It's a simple tool for sending money to your friends. Venmo is mobile-centric, so it's built to work over SMS. There are also simple apps for iOS, Android, and the web. Best of all, if you tie it to your regular debit card, there are no fees involved. Once you establish a tit-for-tat ...

More disasters followed. Poland-based Bitomat, the third-largest exchange, revealed that it had—oops—accidentally overwritten its entire wallet. Security researchers detected a proliferation of viruses aimed at bitcoin users: Some were designed to steal wallets full of existing bitcoi...

A Reaper drone in Afghanistan in 2007. Photo: Air Force The Air Force’s multi-billion-dollar drone fleets may have helped against the insurgents of Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a fight against a real military like China’s, the relatively defenseless unmanned aerial vehicles would get ...

A 3-D model of a bitcoin - not an actual bitcoin, which is purely digital. Photo: Trader Tim /Flickr The FBI sees the anonymous Bitcoin payment network as an alarming haven for money laundering and other criminal activity — including as a tool for hackers to rip off fellow Bitcoin use...

Vegetables grown in multi-level troughs at Sky Greens farm. Photo: Olivia Siong/Channel NewsAsia The first commercial-scale vertical farm has opened in the tiny, densely populated city of Singapore, with the aim of decreasing dependence on food imports. Singapore, which lies at the en...

CSR Racing is one of the App Store’s more aggressive sellers of virtual currency. Its creators gross $12 million per month. Image courtesy NaturalMotion Games “Freemium” apps, which cost nothing to play but charge real money for digital currency, are officially dominant on the App Sto...

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They’ve been indicted by the U.S. government for conspiracy and briefly thrown in jail, but Kim Dotcom and his partners in the digital storage locker Megaupload have no intention of quitting the online marketplace. Instead the co-defendants plan to introduce a much-anticipated new tec...

Cody Wilson planned in the coming weeks to make and test a 3-D printed pistol. Now those plans have been put on hold as desktop-manufacturing company Stratasys pulled the lease on a printer rented out for Wiki Weapon, the internet project lead by Wilson and dedicated to sharing open-s...

Search trends on Google have long offered an unscientific yet irresistible glimpse at what the world seems to be thinking most from one moment to the next. It also offers a peek behind the curtain of Google’s unique brand of omniscience — the serious granularity Google leverages to tu...

Nike makes some cool stuff. In particular, the Nike+ gear is quite interesting. These are different sensors that you can use to measure your performance in sports like running, training, or basketball. Clearly, there is some physics to explore here – and thanks to the good folks at Ni...

has to live in an impure world. Both the code and the idea of bitcoin may have been impregnable, but bitcoins themselves—unique strings of numbers that constitute units of the currency—are discrete pieces of information that have to be stored somewhere. By default, bitcoin kept users’...

A drug package can still be seen attached to the bottom of this downed cartel ultralight plane. Photo: ChuckHolton /Flickr Stopping drug smugglers on the ground is one thing. You can build a fence, send more Border Patrol agents and put up more cameras. But it’s a whole other thing to...